HP wins $3.5 billion NGEN contract

Jun. 27, 2013 - 06:00AM
|

The Navy has awarded incumbent vendor Hewlett Packard a potential five-year, $3.5 billion contract to develop what will be the world’s largest private computer network.

Called the Next Generation Enterprise Network (NGEN), the project will replace the Navy-Marine Corps Intranet (NMCI), a contractor-owned and operated network serving 800,000 Navy and Marine Corps personnel. NGEN will serve roughly the same number of personnel in both services, both in the U.S. and foreign locations.

For the Navy, the new network will be government-owned and contractor-operated, while the Marine Corps will have a government-owned and government-operated model with contractor support. The Marine Corps wanted the ability to travel with the physical components of its network and preferred running the network itself, said Bill Toti, vice president and account executive for HP’s Navy & Marine Corps accounts.

NGEN “required a different approach, a different operating model and it required a different team,” Toti said in an interview. “It wasn’t just optics, but we really did try our best to look at the evolving requirements and build a team that met that need.”

HP’s team includes AT&T Government Solutions, Inc., International Business Machines Global Business Services Federal, Lockheed Martin Services, Inc, and Northrop Grumman Systems Corp.

“I believe we got the best of U.S. industry at the table for this,” Sean Stackley, assistant secretary of the Navy for research, development and acquisition, told reporters Thursday.

The transition to NGEN is expected to take about 13 months, considering there are no bid protests.

In weighing competitors, the Navy sought the lowest price technically acceptable bid. That means once vendors demonstrated they could meet the Navy’s standards for providing network connectivity and services, the next factor was price. HP led one of two teams vying for the NGEN contract, and Stackley said both were technically acceptable. HP’s bid won based on cost.

The losing team included CSC, Harris Corp, General Dynamics Information Technology, Verizon and Dell.

HP’s contract has a one-year base period of $321.7 million and four one-year option periods.